Researching Your Target Market - Tips & Tricks

You're getting excited about your rebrand but you're a little bit nervous that it's not going to appeal to your target market. That's okay! Take a step back and know that before you invest the time and money in a rebrand, it's important to figure out what your target market wants and needs.

STEP ONE: Identify that target market! You know the clients you want to work with and the services you want to offer. Even if you're working on rebranding, you probably know what these things look like already. Take a minute to write them down!

STEP TWO: Talk to your business friends. These are people that aren't in the same market as you but are also entrepreneurs. Get advice on how they handle research and consumer insights. Check out their recommended tools and resources. Gather all the knowledge you possibly can!

STEP THREE: Conduct the research. SurveyMonkey is a fabulous tool for market research and consumer insights mining because it's so inexpensive. You can send a survey out to your current and past clients as a baseline or you can even pay SurveyMonkey to send it out to people in your target market using a list of demographics and interests. At LE Consulting, we use SurveyMonkey for both purposes and we also use it to get feedback from past clients on what things we can change.

Here's some information from SurveyMonkey on how to set up a target market demographic survey: When creating a Targeted Audience Collector, the price per response is based on the country of your survey respondents, the number of questions in your survey, and your targeting criteria. Use the following table to see the price per response based on the country of your survey respondents and the number of questions in your survey. Each targeting option you select costs an additional $0.50 – $10.00 per response, depending on how common or difficult it is to find among our available respondents.

* Each row in the Matrix/Rating Scale question type counts as a separate question. Text descriptions and Images do not count as questions.

As an example, to make this pricing clearer, if you have 15 questions in your survey, you’re looking to get 250 responses, and you’ve selected 3 targeting options, your price per answer will be about $2.50 and you can expect to pay a total of $625 for your responses. Not bad for some additional insight for your launch! Custom market research done by a consumer insights agency would cost thousands of dollars. For just $1,000 you could get 400+ responses based on the information used in this example.

SurveyMonkey allows you to analyze your results using their platform or download a .CSV file of the results for your own use. The simplest option is to analyze on their platform but if you're looking for more in-depth analytics, download the .CSV file and turn it into a pivot table!

If you don't want to use SurveyMonkey for your research, there are other platforms out there like Google Forms, Survio, Survey Planet, PollDaddy, or even TypeForm. Let us know your tips and tricks for market research in the comments below.